DELINQUENT GODS
'Michelet already said it: when the aristocracy of the Olympian gods collapsed at the end of Antiquity, it did not take down with it "the masses of indigenous gods, the populace of gods that still possessed the immensity of fields, forests, woods, mountains, springs, intimately associated with the life of the country. These gods lived in the hearts of oaks, in the swift, deep waters, and could not be driven out of them.... Where are they? In the desert, on the heath, in the forest? Yes, but also and especially in the home. They live on in the most intimate of domestic habits." But they also live on in our streets and in our apartments. They were perhaps after all only the agile representatives of narrativity, and of narrativity in its most delinquent form. The fact that they have changed their names... takes nothing away from the multiple, insidious, moving force. It survives the avatars of the great history that debaptises and rebaptises them.'
- Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p.129-30
'The Mole was staggered at the size, the extent, the ramifications of it all; at the length of the dim passages, the solid vaultings of the crammed store-chambers, the masonry everywhere, the pillars, the arches, the pavements. "How on earth, Badger," he said at last, "did you ever find time and strength to do all this? It's astonishing!"
"It would be astonishing indeed," said Badger simply, "if I had done it. But as a matter of fact I did none of it - only cleaned out the passages and chambers, as far as I had need of them. There's a lot more of it, all round about. I see you don't understand, and I must explain it to you. Well, very long ago, on the spot where the Wild Wood waves now, before ever it had planted itself and grown up to what it now is, there was a city - a city of people, you know. Here, where we are standing, they lived, and walked, and talked, and slept, and carried on their business. Here they stabled their horses and feasted, from here they rode out to fight or drove out to trade. They were a powerful people, and rich, and great builders. They built to last, for they thought their city would last forever."
"But what has become of them all?" asked the Mole.
"Who can tell?" said the Badger. "People come - they stay for a while, they flourish, they build - and they go. It is their way. But we remain. There were badgers here, I've been told, long before that same city ever came to be. And now there are badgers here again. We are an enduring lot, and we may move out for a time, but we wait, and are patient, and back we come. And so it will ever be."'
- Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows, p.82-3
'When midnight comes a host of dogs and men
Go out and track the badger to his den
And put a sack within the hole and lye
Till the old grunting badger passes bye
He comes and hears they let the strongest loose
The old fox hears the noise and drops the goose
The poacher shoots and hurries from the cry
And the old hare half-wounded buzzes bye
They get a forked stick to bear him down
And clap the dogs and bear him to the town...
He turns about to face the loud uproar
And drives the rebels to their very doors...
The bull-dog knows his match and waxes cold
The badger grins and never leaves his hold...
He drives away and beats them every one
And then they loose them all and set them on
He falls as dead and kicked by boys and men
Then starts and grins and drives the crowd agen
Till kicked and torn and beaten out he lies
And leaves his hold and cackles groans and dies.'
- John Clare, The Badger
'I lay in my last self, stricken, like a sheep on its back.
When up comes the jackel-headed god, the guide
who herds the dead
and sniffed and frisked and found me already half
rotted
in a little pile of teeth and broken bone laths
And said he could spare me in exchange for three
truths.
Then first, I said, I don't want to see you again.
Second, I want you to go blind.
Third, I wish you and your kind would come to
some violent end.
And off he went,
chasing some other scent,
muttering to himself
not yet not yet...'
- Alice Oswald, Five Fables of a Length of Flesh
Thursday 18 March 2010
Tuesday 23 February 2010
‘THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY OF THE NEARBY’
Part 1. A Geographical Tension
In 1697, traveller and author Martin Martin set sail to explore the remotest of the Scottish Western Isles. His agenda was an early example of the enthusiasm that would grow throughout the eighteenth century, Daniel Defoe, Thomas Pennant, and Samuel Johnson following in his footsteps:
‘It is a piece of weakness and folly merely to value things because of their distance from the place where we are born: thus men have travelled far enough in the search of foreign plants and animals, and yet continue strangers to those produced in their own natural climate.’
This embarrassed confession that our homeland might be as mysterious to us as the antipodean and purportedly exotic, finds its echo – if an echo can somehow magnify – today under a sky cut to shreds by luminous vapour trails and among a local, natural world under threat. There have been a number of times when we have sought to rediscover the land at our feet, and we are currently undergoing such an endeavour in Britain at the moment. Today though, the embarrassed confession is coupled with an urgency to protect against homogenising industrial and capitalist change. Archipelago, begun in June 2007 by professor Andrew McNeillie, is a recent literary journal with such an agenda. Many of the authors and artists it publishes have gone to the outer isles of our archipelago to reacquaint themselves and, more importantly, our culture, with landscapes that we ought to be more familiar with.
The first edition of this journal publishes two important figures: Roger Deakin and Robert Macfarlane. It is appropriate that they should both appear in this edition, not only because they were great friends but because this represents something of a passing of the torch. Roger Deakin served as a kind of mentor to Macfarlane before his tragic death in 2006, and his presence here reminds us of another very important organisation that he helped to found in 1982: the arts and environmental group Common Ground, whose raison d’etre is ‘local diversity’. In fact we could almost suggest Archipelago is extending the important work of Common Gound beyond the homely mainland and into more wild, but equally threatened landscapes and cultures. Macfarlane has described Deakin on a number of occasions very fondly as an ‘explorer of the undiscovered country of the nearby,’ borrowing from John Hanson Mitchell. It’s a beautiful phrase that almost sounds like it could - if only - one day become a professional position. I was thinking about this, and what might be different in the way we approach the landscape of the near and the landscape of the far, when I read the following from Martin’s trip across the North Atlantic to St. Kilda, the furthest of the Outer Hebrides, 41 miles west of Benbecula:
‘The inhabitants of St. Kilda take their measures from the flight of fowls, when the Heavens are not clear, as from a sure compass, experience shewing that every tribe of fowls bends their course to the respective quarters, though out of sight of the Isle; this appeared clearly in our gradual advances, and their motion being compared, did exactly quadrate with our compass. The inhabitants rely so much upon this observation, that they prefer it to the surest compass; but we begg’d their pardon to differ from them, though at the same time we could but that their rule was as certain as our compass.’
There are two different approaches to the navigation of landscape/seascape here: one by fowls, and one by compass. Both parties concede the others’ preferred method, though we can imagine the dispute had ‘their rule’ not been ‘as certain as our compass.’ But it was. And both methods seem equally as dependable a way of navigating the strait. The difference, though, is an interesting one, and one that I think John Wylie approaches in his book on Landscape.
Wylie describes the term ‘landscape’ as being made up of a number of tensions. The first tension he describes is between ‘proximity and distance’. Proximity, he suggests, drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty, is the realisation that ‘observer and observed, self and landscape, are essentially enlaced and intertwined, in a ‘being-in-the-world’ that precedes and preconditions rationality and objectivity’. And distance, he suggests, drawing on Raymond Williams, is the opposing realisation that ‘landscape is a particular way of seeing and representing the world from an elevated, detached and even ‘objective’ vantage point... akin to other visual technologies (microscopes, telescopes, sextants)’. Both of these, I think, are inescapable in our experience of the world before us, though one often wrestles for dominance over the other. There is something to be learned from this boat’s fragile journey across the strait.
That the inhabitants ‘prefer’ the fowls is an issue of familiarity and of trust, one that seems to emerge from their ‘being-in-that-specific-world’ and their ‘having-been-in-that-specific-world’ for some time. Their involvement living and working on the sea has made it somehow intimately legible. As newcomers, Martin and his companions are prepared to be alienated and the compass is the tool to read for a transcendental logic of the landscape - what Göethe would have called urphänomen – in the absence of a familiar intimacy. In fact, one of the first benefits of the compass when it began to be used at the end of the 13th century was that it opened the sailing season up from April through October to January through December because it meant ships could travel under cloud cover without seeing the stars. It afforded blind travel.
All of this is not to say that one way is preferable to the other. What Wylie identifies is an inescapable tension. The boat approaching St. Kilda has both methods at its disposal, and those aboard should be doubly reassured for it. What is interesting about this example is that both methods are hemmed in together - in the same boat if you like – not quite co-operating but certainly operating side by side. Martin does not dismiss the islanders’ method as primitive hokum. And it could be argued that his openness, warmth and interest are due to the very intention to explore ‘our own natural climate’; and even, perhaps, that such openness, warmth and interest are an integral part of the methodology of the ‘explorer of the undiscovered country of the nearby.’ In a sense the blind instrumentality and transcendental logic of the compass begins to open its eyes to the possibility of an intimacy there before it. It embraces the productive tension rather than the unbalanced opposition of proximity and distance and begins to be able to read a familiar landscape’s foreign language.
‘PART 2. A LITERARY TENSION’ to follow...
Part 1. A Geographical Tension
In 1697, traveller and author Martin Martin set sail to explore the remotest of the Scottish Western Isles. His agenda was an early example of the enthusiasm that would grow throughout the eighteenth century, Daniel Defoe, Thomas Pennant, and Samuel Johnson following in his footsteps:
‘It is a piece of weakness and folly merely to value things because of their distance from the place where we are born: thus men have travelled far enough in the search of foreign plants and animals, and yet continue strangers to those produced in their own natural climate.’
This embarrassed confession that our homeland might be as mysterious to us as the antipodean and purportedly exotic, finds its echo – if an echo can somehow magnify – today under a sky cut to shreds by luminous vapour trails and among a local, natural world under threat. There have been a number of times when we have sought to rediscover the land at our feet, and we are currently undergoing such an endeavour in Britain at the moment. Today though, the embarrassed confession is coupled with an urgency to protect against homogenising industrial and capitalist change. Archipelago, begun in June 2007 by professor Andrew McNeillie, is a recent literary journal with such an agenda. Many of the authors and artists it publishes have gone to the outer isles of our archipelago to reacquaint themselves and, more importantly, our culture, with landscapes that we ought to be more familiar with.
The first edition of this journal publishes two important figures: Roger Deakin and Robert Macfarlane. It is appropriate that they should both appear in this edition, not only because they were great friends but because this represents something of a passing of the torch. Roger Deakin served as a kind of mentor to Macfarlane before his tragic death in 2006, and his presence here reminds us of another very important organisation that he helped to found in 1982: the arts and environmental group Common Ground, whose raison d’etre is ‘local diversity’. In fact we could almost suggest Archipelago is extending the important work of Common Gound beyond the homely mainland and into more wild, but equally threatened landscapes and cultures. Macfarlane has described Deakin on a number of occasions very fondly as an ‘explorer of the undiscovered country of the nearby,’ borrowing from John Hanson Mitchell. It’s a beautiful phrase that almost sounds like it could - if only - one day become a professional position. I was thinking about this, and what might be different in the way we approach the landscape of the near and the landscape of the far, when I read the following from Martin’s trip across the North Atlantic to St. Kilda, the furthest of the Outer Hebrides, 41 miles west of Benbecula:
‘The inhabitants of St. Kilda take their measures from the flight of fowls, when the Heavens are not clear, as from a sure compass, experience shewing that every tribe of fowls bends their course to the respective quarters, though out of sight of the Isle; this appeared clearly in our gradual advances, and their motion being compared, did exactly quadrate with our compass. The inhabitants rely so much upon this observation, that they prefer it to the surest compass; but we begg’d their pardon to differ from them, though at the same time we could but that their rule was as certain as our compass.’
There are two different approaches to the navigation of landscape/seascape here: one by fowls, and one by compass. Both parties concede the others’ preferred method, though we can imagine the dispute had ‘their rule’ not been ‘as certain as our compass.’ But it was. And both methods seem equally as dependable a way of navigating the strait. The difference, though, is an interesting one, and one that I think John Wylie approaches in his book on Landscape.
Wylie describes the term ‘landscape’ as being made up of a number of tensions. The first tension he describes is between ‘proximity and distance’. Proximity, he suggests, drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty, is the realisation that ‘observer and observed, self and landscape, are essentially enlaced and intertwined, in a ‘being-in-the-world’ that precedes and preconditions rationality and objectivity’. And distance, he suggests, drawing on Raymond Williams, is the opposing realisation that ‘landscape is a particular way of seeing and representing the world from an elevated, detached and even ‘objective’ vantage point... akin to other visual technologies (microscopes, telescopes, sextants)’. Both of these, I think, are inescapable in our experience of the world before us, though one often wrestles for dominance over the other. There is something to be learned from this boat’s fragile journey across the strait.
That the inhabitants ‘prefer’ the fowls is an issue of familiarity and of trust, one that seems to emerge from their ‘being-in-that-specific-world’ and their ‘having-been-in-that-specific-world’ for some time. Their involvement living and working on the sea has made it somehow intimately legible. As newcomers, Martin and his companions are prepared to be alienated and the compass is the tool to read for a transcendental logic of the landscape - what Göethe would have called urphänomen – in the absence of a familiar intimacy. In fact, one of the first benefits of the compass when it began to be used at the end of the 13th century was that it opened the sailing season up from April through October to January through December because it meant ships could travel under cloud cover without seeing the stars. It afforded blind travel.
All of this is not to say that one way is preferable to the other. What Wylie identifies is an inescapable tension. The boat approaching St. Kilda has both methods at its disposal, and those aboard should be doubly reassured for it. What is interesting about this example is that both methods are hemmed in together - in the same boat if you like – not quite co-operating but certainly operating side by side. Martin does not dismiss the islanders’ method as primitive hokum. And it could be argued that his openness, warmth and interest are due to the very intention to explore ‘our own natural climate’; and even, perhaps, that such openness, warmth and interest are an integral part of the methodology of the ‘explorer of the undiscovered country of the nearby.’ In a sense the blind instrumentality and transcendental logic of the compass begins to open its eyes to the possibility of an intimacy there before it. It embraces the productive tension rather than the unbalanced opposition of proximity and distance and begins to be able to read a familiar landscape’s foreign language.
‘PART 2. A LITERARY TENSION’ to follow...
Saturday 23 January 2010
Some thoughts on 'The Natural History of Selborne', by G. White
.
.
.
'I am seized with wonder' - Gilbert White (1782)
'He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.' - Ecclesiastes
'It is, I find, in zoology as it is in botany: all nature is so full, that that district produces the greatest variety which is the most examined.' - Gilbert White
'To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.'
- William Blake
(On White's 'The Natural History of Selborne'.) 'it is one of those ambiguous books that seem to tell a plain story... and yet by some apparently unconscious device of the author's has a door left open...' - Virginia Woolf
'And as you sit on the hillside, or lie prone under the trees of the forest, or sprawl wet-legged on the shingly beach of a mountain stream, the great door, that does not look like a door, opens.' - Stephen Graham
'If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.' - William Blake
***
Forget Jim Morrison, forget Huxley and the metaphysics of 'post-human' experience, and perhaps we can read Blake's message today as an emblem and motto for people who commit theselves to having open eyes: those fine natural historians and bird-watchers, those interested artists and writers, those absorbed fans and those passionate local historians. People who commit to noticing, logging. The failure of our witness to the world is inevitable, but White simply looked harder, looked 'narrowly' and more patiently. As Beckett said: 'fail better'. We should all be 'seized' by what we see. Look harder; reach; love. 'Examine'. Absorb. 'Cleanse'.
'I am seized with wonder' - Gilbert White (1782)
.
.
'I am seized with wonder' - Gilbert White (1782)
'He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.' - Ecclesiastes
'It is, I find, in zoology as it is in botany: all nature is so full, that that district produces the greatest variety which is the most examined.' - Gilbert White
'To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.'
- William Blake
(On White's 'The Natural History of Selborne'.) 'it is one of those ambiguous books that seem to tell a plain story... and yet by some apparently unconscious device of the author's has a door left open...' - Virginia Woolf
'And as you sit on the hillside, or lie prone under the trees of the forest, or sprawl wet-legged on the shingly beach of a mountain stream, the great door, that does not look like a door, opens.' - Stephen Graham
'If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.' - William Blake
***
Forget Jim Morrison, forget Huxley and the metaphysics of 'post-human' experience, and perhaps we can read Blake's message today as an emblem and motto for people who commit theselves to having open eyes: those fine natural historians and bird-watchers, those interested artists and writers, those absorbed fans and those passionate local historians. People who commit to noticing, logging. The failure of our witness to the world is inevitable, but White simply looked harder, looked 'narrowly' and more patiently. As Beckett said: 'fail better'. We should all be 'seized' by what we see. Look harder; reach; love. 'Examine'. Absorb. 'Cleanse'.
'I am seized with wonder' - Gilbert White (1782)
Sunday 17 January 2010
A QUESTION OF GRACE
-
It seems somehow appropriate to begin such a blog with some thoughts on Gerard Manley Hopkins, particularly on his idea of 'inscape', and where that might lead in a discussion of landscape. James Cotter, in one of his several studies of Hopkins, quotes the following from an early poem:
It was a hard thing to undo this knot.
The rainbow shines, but only in the thought
Of him that looks. Yet not in that alone,
For who makes rainbows by invention?
And many standing round a waterfall
See one bow each, yet not the same to all,
But in each a hand's breadth further than the next.
The sun on falling waters writes the text
Which yet is in the eye or in the thought.
It was a hard thing to undo this knot.
A hard thing indeed. I wonder if the knot is there to 'undo' - which I take to mean understand - at all. This is not the Newtonian unknotting of the spectrum that Thomson alludes to a century earlier in The Seasons ('The various twine of light, by thee disclosed / From the white mingling maze.') This is the difficult knotting of so much more than that. Cotter comments: 'In water, eye, and thought, the sun inscribes the same curling hieroglyph which knots the three together: matter, sense, and mind. Sunlight words a bond between the world and the soul: the cypher is "the looker's eye" which catches the wording fire in acts of inscape.'
Inscape is too large a concept for me to do justice to here entirely, but perhaps it's clear from the above that it is not a seeing into the thing as it is, but an acknowledgement of the intimate connection we have with the world before us. As Paddy Kitchen points out, it is found through a 'counterpoise between attention and reception.' It is also important to stress that for Hopkins this 'counterpoise' acquaints us with our position in the heart of divine Being, an experience above and beyond our individuality.
In recent British and Irish environmental non-fiction, the concerns of inscape are very much at the fore. Exploring our relationship to wilderness and the natural world, more and more writers are taking to the hills, knotting and unknotting 'matter, sense, and mind'. And yet the movement appears to be a secular one. This raises the question: How is it that we find ourselves qualitatively elaborating what has at times been a christian and deeply religious project?
Tim Robinson, for example, perhaps one of the greatest landscape writers of our time, in his first book about the Aran Islands, asks the following question:
'a dolphin may be its own poem, but we have to find our rhymes elsewhere, between words in literature, between things in science, and our way back to the world involves us in an endless proliferation of detours. Let the problem be symbolized by that of taking a single step as adequate to the ground it clears as is the dolphin's arc to its wave. Is it possible to think towards a human conception of this "good step"?'
That imperative to find rhymes 'between words' and 'between things' that marks us out from the dolphin is the same quest for order that drove Hopkins in search of inscape in the first place ('All thought is of course in a sense an effort at unity.') And yet Robinson qualifies his question by suggesting that it doesn't come out of a 'nostalgia for imaginary states of past instinctive or future theological grace.' It seems so strange to me that he distances his notion of the 'good step' from the idea of grace. Or is it just a nostalgic idea of grace? Or is it simply that unity, harmony, and ethical goodness, are a vocabulary for distinct christian and environmental philosophies. Apparently not, as he goes on even to suggest the impossibility of this step:
'every step carries us across geologies, biologies, myths, histories, politics, etcetera, and trips us with the trailing Rosa Spinosissima of personal associations. To forget these dimensions of the step is to forgo our honour as human beings, but an awareness of them equal to the involuted complexities under foot at any given moment would be a crushing backload to have to carry. Can such contradiction be forged into a state of consciousness even fleetingly worthy of its ground?'
This humble and dutiful intent, this sense of 'honour', voiced at the outset of such a Quixotic task, to me at least, seems to hint at grace, by which I mean at the realisation of a guiding force beyond the individual and into the bigger picture. Whether that bigger picture be geological time or theological seems almost moot, since both are - in all honestly - surely in some way metaphorical and beyond our grasp to really imagine. Hence our immersion in the mystery, knotting and unknotting what we can, testing where we begin and the world ends and vice versa, or just enjoying the slippery overlap.
But it does remain to wonder if there is a role to be played for a spiritual vocabulary in this landscape writing. Or is the absence of such a spiritual vocabulary part and parcel of a spiritually sound methodology, a doing rather than a talking about? I don't know the answer to these questions, but I think there might be something to the following by John Burnside, a poet who seems quite at ease moving between religious and environmental registers:
'Right dwelling in the world is the key to living as spirit... Living as spirit depends on the relationship you maintain with the rest of the world, moment by moment and day by day. So there are times when you have no soul, and times when you do. The soul exists as a possibility, as something that you bring into being by the way in which you dwell on Earth.'
It seems somehow appropriate to begin such a blog with some thoughts on Gerard Manley Hopkins, particularly on his idea of 'inscape', and where that might lead in a discussion of landscape. James Cotter, in one of his several studies of Hopkins, quotes the following from an early poem:
It was a hard thing to undo this knot.
The rainbow shines, but only in the thought
Of him that looks. Yet not in that alone,
For who makes rainbows by invention?
And many standing round a waterfall
See one bow each, yet not the same to all,
But in each a hand's breadth further than the next.
The sun on falling waters writes the text
Which yet is in the eye or in the thought.
It was a hard thing to undo this knot.
A hard thing indeed. I wonder if the knot is there to 'undo' - which I take to mean understand - at all. This is not the Newtonian unknotting of the spectrum that Thomson alludes to a century earlier in The Seasons ('The various twine of light, by thee disclosed / From the white mingling maze.') This is the difficult knotting of so much more than that. Cotter comments: 'In water, eye, and thought, the sun inscribes the same curling hieroglyph which knots the three together: matter, sense, and mind. Sunlight words a bond between the world and the soul: the cypher is "the looker's eye" which catches the wording fire in acts of inscape.'
Inscape is too large a concept for me to do justice to here entirely, but perhaps it's clear from the above that it is not a seeing into the thing as it is, but an acknowledgement of the intimate connection we have with the world before us. As Paddy Kitchen points out, it is found through a 'counterpoise between attention and reception.' It is also important to stress that for Hopkins this 'counterpoise' acquaints us with our position in the heart of divine Being, an experience above and beyond our individuality.
In recent British and Irish environmental non-fiction, the concerns of inscape are very much at the fore. Exploring our relationship to wilderness and the natural world, more and more writers are taking to the hills, knotting and unknotting 'matter, sense, and mind'. And yet the movement appears to be a secular one. This raises the question: How is it that we find ourselves qualitatively elaborating what has at times been a christian and deeply religious project?
Tim Robinson, for example, perhaps one of the greatest landscape writers of our time, in his first book about the Aran Islands, asks the following question:
'a dolphin may be its own poem, but we have to find our rhymes elsewhere, between words in literature, between things in science, and our way back to the world involves us in an endless proliferation of detours. Let the problem be symbolized by that of taking a single step as adequate to the ground it clears as is the dolphin's arc to its wave. Is it possible to think towards a human conception of this "good step"?'
That imperative to find rhymes 'between words' and 'between things' that marks us out from the dolphin is the same quest for order that drove Hopkins in search of inscape in the first place ('All thought is of course in a sense an effort at unity.') And yet Robinson qualifies his question by suggesting that it doesn't come out of a 'nostalgia for imaginary states of past instinctive or future theological grace.' It seems so strange to me that he distances his notion of the 'good step' from the idea of grace. Or is it just a nostalgic idea of grace? Or is it simply that unity, harmony, and ethical goodness, are a vocabulary for distinct christian and environmental philosophies. Apparently not, as he goes on even to suggest the impossibility of this step:
'every step carries us across geologies, biologies, myths, histories, politics, etcetera, and trips us with the trailing Rosa Spinosissima of personal associations. To forget these dimensions of the step is to forgo our honour as human beings, but an awareness of them equal to the involuted complexities under foot at any given moment would be a crushing backload to have to carry. Can such contradiction be forged into a state of consciousness even fleetingly worthy of its ground?'
This humble and dutiful intent, this sense of 'honour', voiced at the outset of such a Quixotic task, to me at least, seems to hint at grace, by which I mean at the realisation of a guiding force beyond the individual and into the bigger picture. Whether that bigger picture be geological time or theological seems almost moot, since both are - in all honestly - surely in some way metaphorical and beyond our grasp to really imagine. Hence our immersion in the mystery, knotting and unknotting what we can, testing where we begin and the world ends and vice versa, or just enjoying the slippery overlap.
But it does remain to wonder if there is a role to be played for a spiritual vocabulary in this landscape writing. Or is the absence of such a spiritual vocabulary part and parcel of a spiritually sound methodology, a doing rather than a talking about? I don't know the answer to these questions, but I think there might be something to the following by John Burnside, a poet who seems quite at ease moving between religious and environmental registers:
'Right dwelling in the world is the key to living as spirit... Living as spirit depends on the relationship you maintain with the rest of the world, moment by moment and day by day. So there are times when you have no soul, and times when you do. The soul exists as a possibility, as something that you bring into being by the way in which you dwell on Earth.'
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